How we store ONE year's worth of Homegrown Food!

When it comes to storage crops, your growing is only as good as your storing. Well, we just finished harvesting all of our storage crops from the season, and it was definitely one of our best harvests yet. Lots of winter squash, cabbage, carrots, beets, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, and beans. So come along as we bring it all inside and show you our simple methods for storing the foods our family will eat through the winter months and beyond. About four years ago, we purchased our home. It was a foreclosed 1950s ranch that needed a lot of work. We renovated just about every square inch of the home, made it our own, and while it's a modest size, it's been the perfect fit for our family of six. Since it's a ranch, it also has a decent-sized unfinished basement. Our first year on the The only issue was we had never stored anywhere near that amount of food and didn't really have a plan of how to do it. But we knew most storage crops like a cool, dark place, so we turned to our basement, got some storage racks, and filled them with all of our homegrown goodness. We might have lucked into it, but that first year, things stored remarkably well. We were still eating winter squash a full year later right up until next year's harvest. Our methods might have changed a bit over the years to help store things better, and we definitely have some goals for what we'd like to improve on in the future, but for the most part, our simple basement storage method has worked great. Really, since we moved in and renovated our house, our basement has gotten out of control. Not only were there stacks and stacks of boxes we still hadn't even unpacked, but there were also countless projects, materials, supplies, and other random things that have gotten thrown down there over the last couple years. It's turned into an organizational nightmare for us, and this year, we finally hit our tipping point. About two months ago, knowing that harvest season was soon approaching, we set out to change that and make our basement a usable space again. It also helped to give us a deadline that my parents were having a garage sale, and we wanted to pare down as much as we could before then and send it to the sale. It was incredibly overwhelming, but we were able to set aside some days, stick to it, and bring some order back to the madness. It's also allowed us to reimagine our food storage space a bit and make it much more spacious and functional than it had been in past years. Since food is such a big part of our world, this is honestly something we wish we would have been more proactive on years ago. It's a breath of fresh air every time we go down there now. Just to give you an overview, these heavy-duty storage racks in our basement really make up a good portion of our food storage area and system. They hold most of our storage crops, but we also have two spare fridges, one in our garage and one in our basement, that we use to store things like carrots, beets, and cabbage. In the freezers of those fridges is where we store a ton of fruit and berries that we froze and stored away when it was ripe earlier in the season. And then our basement pantry is where we store away things that we've canned, like tomato sauce or applesauce, plus anything that we store in five-gallon buckets like our beans and corn. Along with this, we also have a large and a small stand-up deep freezer that we use for storing beef. We try to get a cow process that we raise here on our homestead for meat every year or every other year to feed our family. We also have two small chest freezers that we use for the 50 to 60 meat chickens that we raise. We prefer to store our beef in stand-up freezers so we can easily see and access all of the different cuts, but chest freezers work great for keeping whole chickens. And we're often asked about what the costs are for all of this. And yes, there is an energy cost to running extra fridges and freezers, but in terms of upfront investment, we actually got them all for free or very little from either people that were looking to pass them on or buying them used off of Facebook Marketplace. I think the most we ever paid for a freezer was $30. We started harvesting a good portion of our storage crops about a month ago in mid-September. We actually had a 10-day totally out of the ordinary for us, but really sweet family vacation to Hawaii planned for the beginning of October, and our last video shared about all the foods that our family ate while traveling on that trip. When we returned home, it was time to hit the ground running on the remaining harvest. It was actually really nice to have that break period in the middle of harvest. One, it gave us a chance to recover physically a bit during a really demanding season. And two, we were able to space things out a bit more, mainly curing potatoes. We harvested about half our potatoes before the trip, and those cured for about three weeks before putting them back into bins and laying out the rest of our potatoes to cure. The thing we jumped on harvesting first was the sweet potatoes. We're so thankful that someone gave us the tip that sweet potatoes are really susceptible to damage from frost, potentially even while buried underground and still connected to the vine if it's a deep frost. We were thankful that it didn't frost while on our trip, but there was a frost planned soon after we returned, so sweet potatoes became the priority. Even though sweet potatoes are more of a warm weather tropical crop, we were so happy with our harvest for being in zone 5b. There were a fair number of long thin sweet potatoes that were underdeveloped, but we also had a ton of big plump beauties that will be great for eating and for storage. In all we got four full bins of sweet potatoes, or somewhere in the 150 to 200 pound range. One thing that was super helpful with harvesting them is that we realized it's best to locate where the plant was, dig around it to loosen up the soil, and pull up sweet potatoes while they're still attached to the vine. Regular potatoes can sprawl out a bit more from the plant, so we tend to dig everywhere to find them, but sweet potatoes generally grow in a clump where they're planted. The clumps didn't come up perfectly every time, but overall it went much more quickly with less damaged potatoes when we pulled them up this way. Just like we did with our potatoes, we laid our unwashed sweet potatoes out in a single layer to cure. Storage crops like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and squash are best optimized for storage when they've gone through this curing process. What this process does is really thickens up the skins, gives blemishes a chance to heal up, and really the crop goes into a state of dormancy to preserve itself. We cured our sweet potatoes by laying them out in a single layer on tables or on wire storage racks in our basement where it's cool and dry. We did our best to make sure they weren't touching, but still packed them in pretty close together. The key is that you want as much airflow as possible around them. Since sweet potatoes are a warmer climate plant, you can actually cure them at higher temperatures, but we're going ahead and doing it in our basement alongside our potatoes since that's where we have the room to do it. Then they like to be stored long term in the 55 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit range, which is right around where our basement is at during the winter. One of the other things we did while laying out our sweet potatoes to cure is to check the thin pointy ends of each sweet potato and snap off any ends that were soft or rubbery. Many of the ends were solid and we were able to leave them as is, but any that had a bend to them, the ends would just snap off easily. The exposed flesh of the sweet potatoes heals up on their own while curing, and if left on, those soft ends could cause the rest of the sweet potato to go soft or spoil more quickly. So if you're wanting to store them longer term, this is definitely the route to go. Sweet potatoes really only need a week or two to cure, so after a couple weeks we'll take them off of the tables and racks and put them back into the plastic storage bins and store those on our racks. You can store them in many different ways, brown paper bags, cardboard boxes, crates, but you definitely want to avoid things like plastic bags. It's important for them to have lots of airflow while being stored, which is why we really love these black plastic food storage bins. One of the most frequent questions we get is where we get those black plastic storage bins from. To be honest, these were handed off to us from a farmer friend who folded up their operation and they have been invaluable on the homestead over the years. You might have to do some searching, but they are possible to find used for pretty reasonable prices. Since they're used in the food industry commonly, you might check with grocery stores, restaurants, or other food suppliers in your area to see if they have any extra, or try searching on marketplace or craigslist for food storage bins or crates. After searching high and low for new options, we did finally track one down that's pretty comparable to the ones we have and relatively affordable. We'll link that below. Since they're more of a commercial grade product, they're built super well and should hold up for years. Buying new isn't always the most budget friendly route, but you can definitely make a case for investing in some of these food storage bins since they can be super handy for harvesting and storing away your crops. We grew the Bayou Bell sweet potato variety. Since it's our first year storing them long term, we'll see how it goes, but we're hoping they'll store well for several months. These sweet potatoes are absolutely delicious and we're really enjoying having a change of pace in addition to the regular potatoes we grow every year. Before the first frost hit, we also wanted to take the opportunity to get into our kitchen garden area and pull in most of what we had left there. The main storage crop that we had left was our cabbage. Cabbage are simple. We just cut the head of the cabbage at the base with a paring knife to harvest. We collect them in plastic storage bags and then move them into the fridge for storage. We typically don't process or do anything with the cabbage right away, but the heads will stay fresh in the fridge for a solid month and then after harvest and winter prep is all wrapped up and things quiet down a bit, I'll start turning all the cabbage into sauerkraut. Sauerkraut is fermented cabbage and when it's in this form, it stores well for many months. I store our fermented sauerkraut in the fridge after it's done fermenting on the counter for a week or two. We are currently on our last jar of the sauerkraut that we fermented last year, so this timing is perfect. I try to incorporate something fermented into our daily diet for all the digestive benefits as well as the additional vitamins and minerals it offers, so we love having plenty on hand. We mentioned before having two spare fridges for our storage crops, one in the garage and then one in the basement. We typically put the cabbage in our garage fridge and one thing we learned the hard way is that if you let your heads of cabbage go too long in the frigid winter months during really cold stretches, that garage fridge can freeze and cause the cabbage to turn really slimy and not ideal. So fair warning, if you have a fridge in your garage, don't put anything in there that you don't want to freeze if you're in a colder climate. In our basement fridge, we store our carrots and our beets and these were some of the crops that we had already harvested in mid-September with our first harvest. To store them, we put them in plastic grocery bags right away and then store them in the fridge. Again, you want to make sure to avoid washing any crops that you want to store long term. When stored this way, we've had them stay crisp and fresh for several months. Often, we'll be eating them well into the spring when we're planting for next year's growing season. Oh, look at this guy. That's a big squash. It was a lot of fun wrapping up harvesting all of our butternut squash this year. We harvested about 45 squash a month earlier and we thought we had pulled up roughly half of our squash that was there and we were blown away that that ended up being closer to a third of our total squash and we ended up with nearly 150 butternut squash. There are a ton of different winter squash varieties out there and we've grown several types in the past, but we've landed on butternuts being our favorite both for cooking and storage. They have such a sweet taste and creamy texture, making them perfect for roasting, pureeing, and using in baked goods or adding to soups and stews. To store them, we cure them similar to how we cure potatoes and sweet potatoes in a single layer and not touching each other. Since they're larger, we can just lay them out directly on our wire mesh storage racks in our basement. Again, you want them in a cool, dark, and dry space and you don't want to wash them. Let them cure for a few weeks this way and then those skins will thicken up nicely and blemishes should heal for long-term storage. After they're cured, you could take your squash and store them back in bins or boxes. However, we like to just keep them laid out on the shelves and store them that way. Since they're so big, we don't mind letting them take up a full storage rack. Plus, it's easy to check on them this way and it's easy to identify when one of them might be getting soft or going bad prematurely so you can pull it out. We've had our winter squash store great for up to a full year storing them this way in our basement. With winter squash, like most storage crops, the bigger and more full squash are going to store better than the smaller, less developed ones. So as we're putting them on the racks to cure, we try to separate out the smaller ones or those that weren't fully ripe when harvesting and put them on the top shelf. As we're eating through them, we'll eat the ones on the top shelf or the smaller ones first and then work our way down to the bigger ones since those ones should be more stable long-term. Another question we get asked commonly is about the large storage racks we have. These things are beasts and can handle pretty much any load you want to throw at them. I can seriously do pull-ups on these things. They're roughly six feet long and each of the four shelves are two feet deep so that our black plastic bins fit perfectly on them. Ours are the Gladiator brand, which I think you can get at Home Depot or we'll include a link of a comparable shelf unit below. When each bin could be holding 50 to 100 pounds of potatoes, you'll definitely want something that can handle that weight. Again, they're an upfront investment but they're high quality and should last a lifetime. We also wrapped up harvesting our beans in the past week. This was so much fun to do together alongside our kids and it was such a productive year for beans. We ended up with five paper grocery bags mostly filled up with beans. After our last video on storage crops, so many of you mentioned the pillowcase method of shelling beans that we just had to give it a try. All right, we're just gonna... Previously, we had always shelled our beans by hand, which if you're not familiar with it, shelling them is the process of removing the inside beans from the outer shell. This can take many hours to do by hand and it's taken us months in the past to work through shelling our beans by hand in any spare time slots we have open. Well, we're happy to report we were able to shell all of our beans in just a few hours using the pillowcase method. We tracked down an old pillowcase, grabbed a wheelbarrow, a plastic storage tote, some kitchen mixing bowls, a fan, and we went to work. To start, we filled the pillowcase with about a third of the beans from one of our brown paper bags. One of the lessons we learned early on was to not overfill the pillowcase. Two packed with beans made it difficult for all the pods to release the beans. Then, you really just whack your pillowcase against a flat hard surface. This causes the bean pods to split open and the beans release and fall to the bottom of your pillowcase. There were a few other things that were keys for success here. One is to whack the pillowcase firmly, but not too hard. If you go too hard, you'll end up splitting your beans in half, which you don't want. I found that some beans split regardless, but it's relatively easy to control it and not go too hard. The next tip is to mix the bag often. I'd usually do four or so whacks, then get my hand in there and stir everything around really good. This seemed to help any bean pods that hadn't split open yet have a better chance of opening up. After around 15 or so whacks and three or four times stirring in between, the beans were mostly shelled and ready to be pulled out of the pillowcase. Then, this is where teamwork was the key and our kids got involved. They were our bean hunters. The beans sunk to the bottom of the bag, so I grabbed out handfuls of the bean shells and threw them in a plastic tote. Inevitably, some beans missed getting shelled, so our kids were happy to search through the shells and hunt for the remaining beans. The next step was fun too, and this is where the fan and mixing bowls come into play. Once you pour out the beans from the pillowcase and into your mixing bowl, there are still some of the shells remaining along with other small flakes and bits called chaff. So, you set up your fan and pour the beans from one bowl to the other in front of the fan so that it blows the chaff away and all you're left with is the beans. It honestly felt a bit overwhelming trying this method out at first, but once we got going, the whole setup ran like a well-oiled machine and we had a lot of fun doing it too. The slow method of shelling beans by hand really helped us appreciate the foods we grew and consumed, but I think we'll be sticking with the pillowcase method in the future. In all, we ended up with about three gallons of beans, which should be about enough to feed us for the year ahead. We store them in a five-gallon bucket that we'll move to our basement pantry area that's cool, dark, and dry. These are the food grade five-gallon buckets along with the gamma lids that we picked up from Azure Standard, and we are loving them. The lids give you a super tight seal, but are also really easy to open and access when needed. We'll probably drop one or two oxygen absorbers in the bucket too, just in case any beans weren't fully dried out. Dust it off a little bit. All right, it should shoot right into this bucket here. Our task the next day was to shuck and shell our corn that we had harvested about a month ago, so we fully acknowledge here that ideally we should have shucked our corn right after we harvested it, and typically we do, and then we hang it or lay it out to dry so that it fully dries out, but with traveling earlier this month, it was just one of those things that we didn't get around to do, and we had hoped that the corn would still dry out all right in the husk, and that partially happened. Most of the corn was dried out enough to run through our corn sheller, but some of the ears were still holding on to some moisture, and we shucked those and set them aside to dry out for a couple more weeks. We grow a variety of corn called Oaxacan Green Dent corn. We've grown it for years and love the beautiful green color and the added nutrition that it provides. It dries out and will store well in the whole kernel form for years, and if you're not familiar with corn, shucking it is pulling back and removing the outer husk or leaves around the corn, and then shelling it is pulling the kernels off the cob. Like shelling beans, we used to shell corn by hand, but a couple of years ago we invested in a hand crank corn sheller, and it's been a game changer. Three bins of corn easily would have taken us a full day of shelling prior to the corn sheller, and we would have had sore blistered thumbs by the end of the day. Now we're able to get through all of them in just an hour or two, and everyone really enjoys the process. We filled up a five gallon bucket with corn, so we're stocked. We grind it as we need it into cornmeal, and this should be enough to last us for the next couple years, which is good because we're talking about trying to grow sweet corn instead next year. One thing we forgot to mention for both shelling the beans and the corn husks that we collected is that they can be added in with your animals for extra bedding. Jim dumped them in with our chickens, and they love scratching around in them and searching for any missed beans or corn kernels. Usually the last thing we wrap up with harvesting every year is our potatoes, especially with our Elba potatoes, which are our best storage variety. Elbas are a white potato that we've had stay firm for months beyond the other red, purple, and yellow varieties of potatoes we grow, so we don't mind leaving those in the ground the longest. When we cleaned out and organized our basement a couple months back, many things were purged, but there were two old doors stashed in the corner that I thought I'm going to have a use for those. Well, we were pretty much out of space for curing our potatoes, and I thought those doors would be perfect, so we laid the doors down on some storage totes, and it ended up being just enough space to fit all our Elba potatoes on. We cure our potatoes the same way we cure our sweet potatoes, by laying them out in a single layer in the basement. While the basement is a nice, cool, dark space to cure and store things in, it's not 100% optimal to store potatoes in long term. Our basement hovers between 55 to 60 degrees during the winter months, but potatoes really do best between 40 to 45 degrees Fahrenheit. We haven't pulled the trigger yet, but we've already got a closet space in our basement in mind that we think could be perfect for turning into a cold storage room to really help maximize the storage of our potatoes and other crops. We're thinking something like a CoolBot could be the perfect fit for that. To be honest, we didn't start out setting out our potatoes to cure like this. We would just leave them in the bins and hope that they all cured okay that way. They still lasted pretty good doing it this way, but they'll definitely store the best when properly cured, then stored away. Plus, having them all laid out helps you inspect and pull out any potatoes that might have been stabbed or damaged during harvesting so you can eat through those first. Another thing to be aware of with potatoes is that they are very sensitive to light. White or yellow potatoes especially when exposed to too much light will turn green, which is a buildup of a natural compound called solanine that is toxic, especially when eaten in larger amounts. While our basement is pretty dark, what we came up with for keeping the light off of them was to grab a couple of old bed sheets and drape those over the rack with potatoes entirely so no light enters, and this has worked really great. And we haven't mentioned onions yet. While they're one of our favorite storage crops to grow, we didn't have a great harvest of onions this year. But one thing to note with storing onions is that you want to keep them far away from your potatoes. They both emit gases that cause each other to ripen more quickly. So we keep ours out in our garage while it's cooler fall-like weather, and then move them to our mudroom when it's colder and winter sets in so they don't freeze in the garage. There are a couple more food storage questions that were asked regularly. One is if we have a backup generator for all of our fridges and freezers. We do not. It's something that we've definitely thought about and would probably be a good thing for the future since we have so much valuable food stored. Do you have a generator? What did you go with and has it been worth it? We'd love to hear your thoughts. We're especially interested if anyone has any off-grid solutions out there. It would be great to have something that didn't require a fuel source. Another question we get is about rodents. If we've had issues and how we keep them away from our crops. We may have just gotten lucky so far, but we've really had very little issues with rodents. We don't love using poison, but we do have several bait stations placed strategically around our basement and in our attic that have kept things under control. As long as we've kept those filled, they've never made it far enough to get into our food and do any real damage. The other end of it is being down there and checking on things regularly. We're in our basement grabbing something almost every day, so there are never days or weeks that go by without being downstairs and checking on things. So if there was an issue, at least we'd be able to notice it quickly and do something about it. And last but not least, we hear, but what if I don't have a basement? We're sorry. We know that there's many parts of the country and world where basements just aren't an option or aren't typical. In that case, you'll need to get creative and may need to invest in extra infrastructure. Maybe a cold storage room or lots of extra fridges or some sort of root cellar. Or another option may be that it might look like doing more preserving by canning, dehydrating, freeze drying, or freezing to preserve that homegrown food all year round. We are so so thankful for this lifestyle and the way that this year-round food storage has worked and continues to feed our family all year. To quote Jill Winger of the Prairie Homestead, some people buy lottery tickets, I plant potatoes.